


Elementary, My Dear Wilson

by AndreaLyn



Series: Marathon [5]
Category: House M.D.
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-01
Updated: 2011-07-01
Packaged: 2017-10-20 22:40:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/217865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>House is going to find out who Chase slept with and Chase is going to end the game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Elementary, My Dear Wilson

Chase is performing surgery on a man’s knee, cutting out the excess bits and pieces that have caused it to balloon to three times its original size. It’s hard labor and from the looks of it, he’s very intensely focused on it.

But House doesn’t care. He grabs the microphone and leans on the ‘ON’ button with his cane. The crackle of the static fills the air and House is filled with the satisfaction of knowing, he just _knows_ that he’s got his audience right there and keen on listening.

Said audience includes Chase, who’s stopped working on the knee and has started to look up, the surgical mask hiding everything but his eyes (and House can still tell if he’s lying, just using his gaze; he’s that good. Or maybe Chase is just that bad).

“Who did you sleep with?” House’s voice booms into the surgical room and Chase looks like he could use someone to dab the sweat off of his forehead right about then.

But no answer comes.

If only it were that easy.

*

Eventually, House realizes that he’s going to have to do this the old fashioned way when it comes to figuring it out. Put two chemicals in a room with each other and you have to prod them a little before they combine and (with luck) completely explode and give a reaction that explains it all.

He’s going to have to spy.

*

 ****

Foreman

He figures this is a dead end before he even begins the investigation. It’s no mystery to the Western hemisphere in general that Foreman doesn’t like Chase and vice-versa and they make it obvious when they work together. But…and this is just a theory House has got brewing. But what if that’s just a clever front? Foreman’s never been averse to spending off-hour time with Chase and Cameron and his complaints are usually about how Chase likes to put on a smile to the patients but is all-business behind doors. Foreman, House swears, is just jealous that someone else could possibly be House version two point oh when, really, he’s already got the thing in the bag if he wants it.

He starts his investigation with a series of subtle, yet clever questions.

“So, you banging Chase?”

“Uh, excuse me?” Foreman asks in return. “I must have misheard you. I could have sworn you just asked me if I was sleeping with Chase.”

House sucks on the cherry-flavored lollipop in his possession and kicks up his feet onto the glass table that separates the boys from the men, the bosses from the employees, the homies from the dawgs, if you will. “Yeah. You. Chase. You hitting that?”

“Did I miss the memo that says I’m suddenly gay?” Foreman has to wonder aloud, but he doesn’t flinch. House leans forward to study him a little closer, trying to determine whether this cool and calm demeanor is just for tricks or whether he’s just trying to get a one-up on House or whether he just doesn’t care at all. “And if I were? _Chase_?”

“What.” House takes a moment and the epiphany flickers over his face. “Me?”

“I’m not saying that I’m ready to switch teams,” Foreman calmly points out. “But in the event we were in some freakish parallel universe, then you’re way more my type than some pretty rich boy.” His hands are folded together and if House squints, he can see the way Foreman’s tapping his middle finger against his knuckles, as if it’s getting ready for an appearance to flip House off.

“Wow,” House overreacts, mouth going into a stretch that would make Gumby jealous. “And here I thought you hated me. So all that time pulling on my pigtails, you were just…”

“House, why do you want to know if I’m sleeping with Chase?” Foreman asks the pertinent question and then goes so far as to laugh, a bit dismissively. “Why do you care?”

“He’s sleeping with someone,” House answers, disgruntled as he starts tapping out the beat to ‘House of the Rising Sun’ on his desk with his index and middle finger. “And I want to find out just who it is.”

“And then make their, and Chase’s life, a living hell,” Foreman fills in the blanks of what House hadn’t been saying.

“Good, you’re all caught up on the story. So, Cuddy or Cameron?”

Foreman doesn’t dignify that with an answer – at least not an audible one, because the glare he’s shooting at House could kill three lesser men – and puts the latest patient files on House’s desk before he gets up and leaves the room, narrowing House’s field down to the rest of his team, friends, colleagues, the entire hospital nursing staff, and the entire state of New Jersey.

Well, except the priests. House figures Chase has already been there, done that, being a Catholic and all.

*

 ****

Cuddy

It can’t _possibly_ be the she-wolf herself, but when it comes down to it, maybe Chase just pulled an ancient Roman grab and has been suckling at Cuddy’s teats for this long before he runs off to go establish his city. Or, in this case, the foundations of this frustration he’s putting House through.

Everyone is still a suspect from the nurses to the accountant to the janitor and to Cuddy, herself.

He starts by breaking into her office to sift through her trash and search for any telltale signs. Maybe there’s some vegemite scrapings on the bottom of the bin or maybe Chase’s lipgloss ran out and it’s in there. Maybe there’s a receipt from a restaurant or a coaster from a bar. There has to be something. Glancing over his shoulder, House knows he’s up against the clock, so he picks up the trash to get it back to his office. And that’s when the janitor comes in.

“ _Lo conseguí, hermano_ ,” House assures wryly, the words rolling off his tongue as he brushes past Hispanic Hector, or whatever the janitor’s name is. He’s leaning his weight on the cane and grasping the waste bin tighter as the janitor stares at House with deep-seated confusion.

“I speak English,” he says, without a trace of an accent.

“Yeah, you and three-hundred and one million others in this country!” House calls back to him. “Learn Mandarin and _then_ brag.”

The janitor’s gone with a mumbled curse under his breath at House’s expense, but he still has the trash can as his claimed victory of his dangerous mission into the lair of the Succubus herself.

He picks through the various items that the trash has to offer. Receipts for creams, for dinners, for prescriptions to enhance hormones...

Now that brings up a definite image. He can imagine it now like it’s something out of General Hospital.

  
_We fade in on a desperate woman who wears low-cut shirts to get attention and then rebukes it and a preternaturally pretty-boy who pretends he doesn’t understand why people stare at him. Close in as they speak:_

 _ **CHASE**  
I desperately want to have your baby because I had a particularly damaging childhood and have screwed myself up so badly that I’ll never be able to have the kind of healthy relationship people require to get married and have kids, so I am offering you all my blond-haired, blue-eyed, impeccable-genetics._

 _ **CUDDY**  
Oh, Doctor Chase!_

And there’d probably be swooning and sighing and probably not kissing, because the most he could imagine is Chase freezing like a deer in headlights while Cuddy opens up her maw for the kill. No, it can’t be Chase who’s offering his services as sperm. For one, he’s never exactly been a cougar-hunter and if he were, House would have given him all the tips in the world. Chase tends to skew more towards cradle-robber (and isn’t that what got them into this whole mess in the first place?)

But still…it bears thinking about.

It bears so much thinking about that House doesn’t sleep more than a couple of hours that night and his waking time is spent staring up at the ceiling and counting the small holes there as he wonders if, in his desperation, Chase had gone to Cuddy and determined the best way to get back at him. And together, they decided it would be to screw copiously until Cuddy had a kid and he became ‘Uncle Greg’.

To anyone else, it might have sounded too complicated, almost too much like it was straight out of a soap opera. For House, it fit right into the soap-opera-like landscape of his brain. They might have even asked Cameron’s help in monitoring the progress of the kid.

So for four weeks, House monitors Cuddy like a hawk, her eating habits, her moods, her drug intake. And when she’s coming around to another ovulation cycle and she starts going through the same routine as usual, he breathes easily and knows that Chase didn’t go for Revenge-Via-Procreation-With-The-Devil.

He finds out that they’re not having sex in a roundabout way when House meets ‘Jake’, the new man that she’s dating and has been, apparently, for two months. “Leave him alone,” Cuddy snaps at him when he brings it up.

“I was just admiring his…what do you call it when a man’s prematurely grey?”

“Dignity?” she retorts.

“So, pretty good in bed to keep around for two months.”

“Yes, he is,” Cuddy agrees.

“And you and him have been faithful,” House keeps going, poking at the sore with his bare finger because he refuses to give up until it’s burst. “Or, at least, you have. He’s a man, so…”

“Yes, we are faithful, the sex is incredibly athletic, and you can do an MRI on your patient, now please, _go_ ,” Cuddy instructs firmly.

He does, suspicions mostly allayed that it’s not Cuddy that Chase had nipped off for a little sex break with. And since he’s done a little snooping into Chase’s personal life, he’s found no evidence that he’s called anyone in the Jersey area for a quickie, so that rules out most of his ex’s, the BDSM club, and any nuns who want to get in one good mortal sin before they die.

So that leaves him to the nursing staff, the interns, his friend and sometimes-admirer.

*

  
**Wilson**   


House sets up camp in Wilson’s office for his expedition to find the truth. He’s got bags of chips, he’s stolen a portable television from the pediatrics ward, and he’s made sure that Wilson’s appointments for the day have all been cancelled. It takes exactly fourteen minutes for Wilson to trudge his way up to the office, come in, put his briefcase down, and look defeated. “You cancelled all my appointments.”

“I _rescheduled_ them,” House clarifies, sucking the salt from a chip from off of his thumb. “It’s a very subtle difference.”

“I suppose I should be glad you didn’t just dump all my files in the trash like last time?” Wilson sighs, sitting in his chair and massaging his temples. “What do you want? Money? Drug referral? Some illegal procedure that you need a scapegoat for?”

“I borrowed money from you last week, Cameron filled up my Vicodin, and I already pinned my most recent wrongdoings on whatever that med student’s name is. The one who thought I was teaching her about bedside manner.”

“Lauren,” Wilson helps him out. “She’s currently afraid that it’s her fault that the patient ingested such a large amount of drugs, but I’ve been trying to convince her that no, in fact, it is a random jackass who refuses to take accountability.”

“Does that mean you slept with her?”

“Or I possibly have an interest in other human beings!” Wilson says right back at him. “It’s an interesting feeling, humanity. You should try it sometime; we’re always accepting new applicants. What…do you want, then?”

House doesn’t answer. He just eats another chip and makes sure that it takes a very long time to swallow. Whereas blunt works with Foreman, he wants to make Wilson uneasy and really feel the heat of the pressure of the situation. House has set up camp for a long stay and he intends to win this campaign.

Wilson settles in, stares him down, and it’s within five minutes that he knows he’s facing a losing battle – or so House surmises – because he gets out his wallet and digs out a couple of bills. “You want coffee today?” he offers.

“The usual.”

“Right.”

And it goes like this for some time. House is there in the mornings with a variety of delicious snacks – sometimes sandwiches, occasionally candy, once he made extra-buttery popcorn and the smell didn’t go away for days – and he cancels as much of Wilson’s work as he can get away with. It takes nine days for Wilson to snap past the point of tolerance. “Alright, enough! What do you want!”

“I want to know if you slept with Chase.” And there it is; simple, accusatory, perfect.

Instead of answering the question, Wilson begins to laugh at him and he gets so out of control with it that soon, there’s snorting laughter and the coffee he’s been drinking is in peril of shooting out all over his desk via Wilson’s nose.

“You…oh god…you.”

House rolls his eyes and gives Wilson a sharp look. “Did you?” he demands directly, tired of camping out and of avoiding the issue like Cuddy when it’s that time of the month.

“If I did, wouldn’t you have already guessed?”

And House will be damned if Wilson’s logic isn’t wholly sound on that one. House has a habit of knowing Wilson’s ins and outs, which ex-wife he’s gone back to for an anniversary quickie, which days are best to guilt him into buying House’s lunch and which days are best for asking him to deliver a ‘you’re dying’-gram to his patients.

But still, at least House hasn’t done any work in the last nine days.

*

  
**Cameron**   


The nurses and interns have all checked out, mostly because they’re still looking at Chase with that longing stare of ‘why oh why won’t the handsome foreign doctor just look at me _once_ ’ and not ‘why won’t that bastard call me back?’ House used to be an expert in that second look, so he can spot one in a crowd.

So that leaves Cameron and assorted New Jerseyites, but House isn’t that committed to start randomly polling the city as to whether they’ve enjoyed sex with an Australian in the last few months.

He zeroes in on Cameron during lunch one day, scoping her out through the fronds of a plant before slamming his cane down between her and her table, immediately getting in her way. It’s not much appreciated by the glare on Cameron’s face, but she just ducks under the cane (tray and all) and sits down. “I finished your mail,” she says calmly. “And I slept with Chase. Three times.”

House opens his mouth to tell her not to even bother responding to the latest round of pleading mails about him doing the lecturing circuit when the second part of her admission sinks in.

“You’re lying,” he accuses, first, because he needs to find out if she’s lying and an accusation of that usually draws out whether a person is or not.

Cameron just stares him down and doesn’t answer. The silence is ruined by her spearing pieces of Caesar salad with a plastic fork and loud crunching to accompany it. She gives House a very long look and shakes her head while swallowing. “Twice in one night. And once again when he came home to my place,” she answers, twirling her fork before it descends to demolish the remainder of the plate.

House doesn’t linger. He has no reason to.

Now he has to go to the source.

*

Chase is out of surgery when House starts following him and it’s not very suspenseful, seeing as if Chase really wants to, he can just start sprinting and get away from House in a couple seconds flat. House is counting on Chase’s curiosity to get the better of him and for him to slow and ask why House is following him.

House is right (but then, that’s no surprise).

Chase slows down before they make it to the double-doors that lead them to the rest of the hospital and turns, looking House up and down curiously. “What?” he asks, like there isn’t the issue of this little game between them hovering over their heads.

“You slept with Cameron,” House accuses slowly, watching Chase’s face for a reaction that says anything other than ‘yes, yes, I did, and it was great and I probably won’t tell you a word about it’. That’s about all House gets though, when Chase offers a blank expression coupled with a shrug and turns to keep walking. “You didn’t sleep with Wilson because Wilson wouldn’t have done it, Foreman won’t go gay for you, his words, and Cuddy terrifies the crap out of you, so you settled for the one woman who would pity you,” House reasons, not letting Chase slip away just yet. “I get that you were trying to teach me a lesson, but as far as lessons go, that’s pretty…”

“We’re dating,” Chase announces, cutting House off with a sharp look.

“…pathetic,” he finishes, because the same adjective applies under the scrutiny of new information. “Am I supposed to applaud? Buy you the blender you want from your registry?”

“You’re supposed to stop,” Chase says quietly, stepping forward so that their conversation somehow miraculously stays between just the two of them. House will decide if he wants it to become hospital gossip later, but for now, he lets Chase believe he’s got the upper hand. “No more games. No more autopsy notes or seeing how far it takes before I break, no more…”

He would have said more if it hadn’t been for House waiting for the last person to clear the hall. He would have continued, but House blocks the entrance with his end of his cane and yanks Chase into a firm kiss under the unassuming hospital ceilings. The scratch of House’s stubble brushes against Chase’s cheek and Chase wraps his arm around House’s waist before he kisses back, hard and with the pressure of a man who hasn’t moved on completely.

It’s a shame, really, that he jumps away when someone pounds at the blocked door and House lets the pressure of his cane come away from it.

An elderly doctor brushes past the both of them, but Chase and House both aren’t very mobile as they stare at one another.

“So, dating Cameron?” House offers conversationally, scratching the side of his face as he tilts his gaze ceilingwards. “How’s that work?”

“We’re still done,” Chase insists, a bit regretful, but firm. “I can’t take it, House. I swear.” He shakes his head and looks like he just might explode right there and his scrubs will just go up in the flames of a frustrated man and will have to be put out by eager nurses, wanting a piece of him. “You had your fun. You ran your marathon. And you won,” he offers. “So be happy and leave me alone,” Chase manages before he’s off and down the hall without looking back once.

House watches him go before he turns to evaluate where he’s going next.

There’s paths enough to run in the hospital, all leading to a different finish line, but House thinks he should just go back to the slow canter he’d started years and years ago and hasn’t exactly gotten around to finishing. After all, why rush when every mile of that race is just so enjoyable?

To James Wilson’s office, it is.

THE END


End file.
